You may occasionally get paid to color.

The Story:  In your readings of picture books for storytime and such, you come upon a title that would make a great storyboard.  Sequential, clear reference to objects, illustrations you can recreate in felt.  You've never made a felt story before, but you've been handling them for years and they're just shapes cut out and glued together and sometimes painted.  How hard could it be?  Well, if you'd chosen a simple story, with very easy illustrations to recreate and few of them, it wouldn't be hard at all.  Instead, you've chosen a story with more than a dozen animals to make out of felt, plus two people.  This is going to be quite the project, and so you decide to make the most difficult pieces first, to see if you can do it.  That way, if you can't, you haven't wasted all this time making pieces for a story you can't finish.  You look up various how-tos for making felt pieces, but you don't 100% love any of them, so you make it up as you go along.  And as it turns out, one of those steps involves coloring.  Yay!

Step 1 - Pick what picture is going to be made into felt from the illustration.  Usually, it is whatever animal or object that is referenced in the text of that page spread.  

Step 2 - Decide if a direct copy of the illustration is going to be recognizable and worth doing exactly, or if it is better to find a drawing of that thing online and copy that.

Step 3 - Trace the image from the book or internet.  If you don't have a light desk, which most libraries don't, you should photocopy the page, open a new publisher or word document and make the blank page fill the whole screen, then tape the photocopied page and the blank page to the monitor.  This will let you isolate the image you want from all the background noise, getting a clear line drawing of your object.

Step 4 - Make multiple copies of your line drawing.  You will need one for each piece of felt (or you can group them into pieces that don't overlap; see picture at bottom of post), because you'll need to cut them out separately, and sometimes one piece will overlap another.  If you only have one drawing to work from, you're screwed.

Step 5 - Color one of your copies, and keep each colored pencil/crayon/whatever so that you have your palette of colors.

Step 6 - Take your coloring implements to the craft closet or store and use them to choose which colors of felt to get.

Step 7 - Use a marker to outline what you're going to cut out of each piece of paper, making sure to leave extra room where things will be attached later, and figuring out which pieces are going to be doing the overlapping and which ones will be overlapped upon.

Step 8 - Make the cut.

Step 9 - Put the outline side down on the felt and trace the shape you just cut out using a sharpie or other marker.  This will give you the reverse of the shape you want to end with traced out.

Step 10 - Cut out the shape.  Flip it over.  If you were not exact with your cutting, any messy outlines leftover from tracing will now be on the back of the felt piece where nobody can see them.

Step 11 - Repeat for all the shapes that make up your story piece, and glue them together.  That industrial strength glue you got for fixing toys?  Perfect for felt crafting.  Put it on with a toothpick, and put scrap paper or cardboard down on your desk to reduce the marker stains and glue globs.

Step 12 - Paint or color any additional details on your felt piece.

Step 13 - Repeat for all of the pieces in your story.

The Lesson:  Sometimes, crafting can be fun, and while technically also work, it can also be a kind of zen-like release from the stresses of your other day-to-day work-related responsibilities.  So don't feel guilty about not doing "real work" when crafting.  Sometimes, you just have to get paid to color.

The Resources:  There are a million and a half tutorials on felt/flannel board story making online.  Some of them are cut-and-glue, others are print and iron-on, others are cut one shape and color/paint all the details.  Everyone has their preferences.  The method I used takes a bit more time, I feel, than the others seem like they would, but I like the quality of the pieces better.  I did use google image search quite a bit to come up with clip-art/line-drawing/coloring-page style animals to use for some of the characters where tracing what was on the page would not translate well.  Honestly, google image search and homeschooler/mommy-blogs will get you most any craft project you could think of.

You may have to have a flexible schedule (Butterfly Garden Part 5)

The Story:  The seeds you've started in the trays have started to sprout.  Huzzah!  Some of them are being more pokey than others and you realize that if you were to wait for more plants to germinate, the early risers would be wilted and smothered by waiting too long in those tiny pods.  Good thing you're flexible and don't mind having two different sprout-planting sessions, which wind up being about three weeks apart.  Even with two sessions, there is still about a whole tray's worth of pods that never grew anything.  In fact, some of them even started to mold, sitting in the miniature greenhouses that those starter trays are.  Eventually you just had to face the fact that seeds are so numerous because there is a built-in mortality rate, and dump the dead pods.

Another thing you have to be flexible about is the idea of a neat-looking, organized garden.  The idea of having all these lovely little native plants growing up in clearly-labeled sections with pretty hand-painted stones identifying which plants are which is so far from reality that you're laughing at the past you that had the naiveté to think that was even a possibility when children were involved.  Kids planted whatever pods they wanted, wherever they wanted, regardless of your suggestions and instructions to plant the ones from this tray here and that tray there.  The trays being what you thought they were in the first place was a bit of a gamble because of how the seed-starting session went (that story is here), so it makes sense that the actual planting would be equally disorganized.  And the painted stones actually being next to the plants they're labelled for?  Forget about it!

The Lesson:  Nature is chaos.  Embrace it.  In the wild, native plants can grow in bunches of the same variety, but they just as frequently grow in heterogeneous communities that look like they were haphazardly thrown there by a bunch of five-year-olds, and this actually creates the biodiversity and balance that all ecosystems need to survive.  So, when a bunch of children haphazardly plant your carefully selected native plant species here, there, and everywhere, they're just being true to nature.  You may have to rethink what you consider a success, and that the purpose of the butterfly garden is to provide a habitat for endangered monarchs and food for other native pollinators, not to look like it was clipped from a magazine.   "Clean" gardens that are more mulch than leaf, gardens that don't have plants growing up around each other, gardens that don't use as much of the space as possible to support plant life, are gardens that don't really contribute anything to the environment.  If you're going to spend the time to teach kids about native plants and build a garden at your library, you want that project to pull its weight.

The Resources:  Get some cheap hand trowels from your local hardware store and have some gardening gloves on hand.  Most of my kids didn't want them, because who doesn't expect dirt on their hands when they're planting?  But, it's good to have some for the kids and adults that do want to use them.  I brought in extras from home and borrowed some tools from gardening friends as well, because nobody wants to pay for dozens of tools that you're only going to use once or twice a year.

You may find yourself using some strange tools

The Story:  As a librarian, you have many intellectual tools in your toolbox:  querying databases, the art of the reference interview, organizing meta-data.  However, you may be unaware of the actual physical tools you will sometimes require to do your job effectively:  hammer and nails, box cutter, canned air, various industrial-strength glues, an assortment of screwdrivers, allan wrenches, pliers, scissors, and, yes, a toothbrush.  Things break in the library, and you will be called upon to know, or learn quickly, how to fix them.  This is especially true of new technology, or slightly less-new technology for which you may not have free or in-house tech support or replacement options.  If you want to do innovative crafts, you'll have to get your hands on some innovative tools, and not be afraid to use them.  All of the tools pictured above are things I have actually used in my workday to fix toys, prepare after-school maker/craft activities, and trouble-shoot new technology (a.k.a - the 3D printer is clogged again).

The Lesson:  Always be willing to learn, try, and fail before you succeed at fixing something physical.  Also, never underestimate the power of google.  There are so many how-tos and fix-it/DIY websites and forums out there, that you can learn to fix, replace, or take apart just about anything.  Don't be afraid to look beyond the manufacturer's website for help if your problem doesn't come up in their FAQ.  Also, if something is broken enough that you have been called upon to fix it, it's likely that you can't break it much worse if you're actually following some kind of directions rather than just tinkering and hoping for the best.  And once you do actually manage to fix the darn thing, it can be kind of fun and empowering, knowing that you were able to do this thing yourself.

The Resources:  Youtube, Instructables, WikiHow, Lifehacker, and iFixit (one of my personal favorites).  There are a ton more out there, too, devoted to any specific problems you might have.